kevintupper.com

John Lennon wrote “All You Need is Love” in 1967.  Speaking about the song a month after its release, Beatles manager Brian Epstein said, “The nice thing about it is that it cannot be misinterpreted.  It is a clear message saying that love is everything.” [1]  It sounds nice, but is it true?  Let’s consider it.

What is love?  To many it’s an ethereal thing that is hard to put in words.  The first three definitions for love according to dictionary.com are:

1.    a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person.

2.    a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend.

3.    sexual passion or desire.

As can be seen, the definition is contextual.  Most will agree that the first definition is likely closest to the type of love Epstein is referring to.

The ancient Greeks had three different words for love: agape, philia, and eros. [2]  Agape is the word most Christians would apply to the word love as expressed in Lennon’s song.  Agape goes a bit further than “a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person.”  It includes the idea of willingly putting the needs of the loved ahead of your own in a sacrificial sort of way.  This is the word the Scriptures use most when you see the word love as coming from God.

The apostle Paul went so far as to express that the whole law is fulfilled in loving your neighbor as yourself. [3]  And that if you loved your neighbor, you fulfilled the law. [4]  John, the disciple whom Jesus loved, wrote that God is love and that anyone who loves is born of God. [5]  According to Paul and John (not McCartney and Lennon but the apostles), it would appear that Epstein and the Beatles have a point.  In fact, I have read and heard people say, it is not important whether or not the gospel is true or if someone believes in Jesus.  All that matters is that we love people.  That shows we are from God, regardless of our beliefs about Jesus, the resurrection, or the gospel.

Beloved, carrying the message of love to this extent makes us idol worshippers.  Love has become the idol.  Yes, God is love, but love is not God.  Love does not exist apart from truth.  Consider further the words of Paul and John.

Paul’s teaching on love fulfilling the law has its foundation in Jesus teaching on the greatest commandment where love of God precedes love of neighbor. [6]  This is not absent from Paul’s writings. [7]  Paul did not preach love, he preached the gospel! [8]  It is the gospel that gives love meaning.

John’s teaching in the book of 1 John is even more direct.  Many times when there are large passages of scripture in writing like this we skim over them.  We think we are familiar with their message and don’t take the time to read and meditate on the written word.  I implore you, read and consider what John had written about love in the context of what he wrote.  Allow his words to grip your heart.

Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come.  Therefore we know that it is the last hour.  They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us.  But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all have knowledge.  I write to you, not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and because no lie is of the truth. Who is the liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son.  No one who denies the Son has the Father.  Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also.  Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you.  If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the Son and in the Father. And this is the promise that he made to us – eternal life.

I write these things to you about those who are trying to deceive you. But the anointing that you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about everything, and is true, and is no lie-just as it has taught you, abide in him. [9]

By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him; for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything. Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God; and whatever we ask we receive from him, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him.  And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us.  Whoever keeps his commandments abides in God, and God in him. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit whom he has given us. [10]

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone into the world.  By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God.  This is the spirit of antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.  [11]

“Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world.”   “All You Need is Love” may have been a hit song, but it is not the gospel.  Brian Epstein may have been a great manager, but a prophet he was not.  Love is not everything.  Love is a person who has a face and a name.  Jesus.

1 – Vancouver Sun Article
2 – Greek_words_for_love
3 – Gal 5:14
4 – Rom 13:8
5 – 1 John 4:7-8
6 – Mat 22:34-40
7 – Phil 2:1-10; Phil 3:8-15
8 – Acts 17
9 – 1 John 2:18-27
10 – 1 John 3:19-24
11 – 1 John 4:1-3

The financial system is teetering on the precipice.  Recession or depression is upon us.  A liberal who is going to raise our taxes and drive our economy into a deeper recession may be elected President.  A senile old warmonger who knows little about the economy and will bring about World War III may be elected President.  How do you feel?

Let’s make it more personal.  Your financial position is teetering on the precipice.  Your home has dropped 30% in value over the last two years.  Your portfolio is down 25%, back to its 2001 valuation, thanks to the economic downturn.  Meanwhile the cost of gas, a carton of milk, and just about everything else is up 33%.  To make matters a little worse, you find out your employer will be downsizing and you are the low man on the totem pole.  How do you feel?

Are you fearful or anxious?  It is natural to be so, especially when you are “invested” in those things, both literally and figuratively.  Who would not be fearful or anxious when the things you have worked for, indeed your very life, is crumbling around you?    

Nevertheless, rejoice!  God is giving you another opportunity to trust Him. ^[1]  When God shakes the earth and the heavens you get to see which kingdom you are living in. ^[2]  Let your feelings be the barometer.   If you are fearful or anxious, let it drive you to repentance.  Trust in the living God and ask Him for grace and help in your time of need. ^[3] 

To grow stronger, build upon that foundation of trust.  Actually do what Jesus said to do. ^[4]  Consider the lilies of the valley.  No, really consider them.  Slow down, admire their beauty.  Take pleasure in them.  How hard are they striving to grow and be so beautiful?  Realize that the richest man to ever live could not cloth himself so finely.  Look at the birds.  Study them.  Are they sowing and reaping?  Do they have vast barns built to store up for retirement?  No, they are cared for by God.  And are you not far more valuable to Him than they are?  Of course you are!  So rest in His love and care as one loved by God, in spite of the trials. 

When good times come again, and they will, remember whose you are.  Do not allow your heart to be captured again.  Do not allow the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches during the good times to rob you of true joy. ^[5] 

[1] – James 1:2-4

[2] – Hebrews 12:26-29

[3] – Hebrews 4:15-16

[4] – Matthew 6:25-28

[5] – Mark 4:18-19

Ron Paul writes:

Dear Friends:

The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.

We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy – all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment – and prevent the market’s attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.

Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I’d only be repeating what I’ve been saying over and over – not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.

Still, at least a few observations are necessary.

The president assures us that his administration “is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets.” Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?

We are told that “low interest rates” led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments – investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.

Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or “wildcat capitalism” (as if we actually have a pure free market!).

Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: “Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk.”

Doesn’t that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn’t that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn’t the federal government shown that the “many” who “believed they were guaranteed by the federal government” were in fact correct?

Then come the scare tactics. If we don’t give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary “the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet.” Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.

It’s the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.

The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.

F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks’ manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day – and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:

Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.

To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection – a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end… It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.

The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.

The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?

Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a “rescue plan”? I guess “bailout” wasn’t sitting too well with the American people.

The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you’re supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.

I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects – the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.

H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.

In liberty,

Ron Paul

Do a google search on executive pay compared to worker pay.  You’ll find dozens of articles.  Recently I read that CEO compensation was 344 times the average worker.  Sure you can make statistics say lots of things, but the trend is unmistakable.  Many fat cats are getting fatter without apparent concern for anyone but themselves.

I’ve always read the beginning of James 5:1-6 and thought of our current day environment.   I think it even more so when we look at this credit debacle.  Capitalism fails under a non-virtuous people.  Greed destroys all those it inflicts.  Thankfully brokenness is the beginning of repentance.  My God grant repentance.

5:1 Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. 2 Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. 3 Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days. 4 Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. 5 You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. 6 You have condemned and murdered the righteous person. He does not resist you. (ESV)